Earlier this week, Sixth District Congressman Ben Cline and 45 other House Republicans voted for an amendment sponsored by his bizarre and chronically deranged colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene to slash funding for NATO.
“My amendment strikes funding for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO Security Investment Program. My amendment would strike over $433 million in NATO funding from the bill. America should not be doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to international organizations to help them fight their enemies, especially when they are unwilling to fight for themselves,” Greene began, echoing rhetoric from former President Donald Trump.
Greene concluded her remarks, saying, “But yet, America is beyond our pledge. We are spending in 2023, 3.5% of our GDP. But yet we don’t do anything to defend our own country and our own borders. This is why Americans would love to see Congress take action, action to defund NATO, and stop spending hundreds of millions of their hard earned money to foreign countries to defend these foreign countries, while we don’t defend our own country and our own people.”
Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz responded: “I think the sponsor of the amendment has shown pretty clear evidence that she has no idea what the NATO Security Investment Program is actually funding.”
“So that we can make sure that we invest properly in infrastructure for a vast array of training facilities, of national security facilities, of hangars that contain our airplanes, military aircraft that cost billions of dollars. So everything about what the amendment does actually makes our own service members who are fighting overseas to defend our national security interests and to defend our country less safe…
“Madam chair, we have a responsibility to make sure that the infrastructure that we fund is in pristine, well-kept, well-kept condition. And what the sponsor of the amendments would do is decimate our ability to do that. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic. And we should not not support this amendment, and members should vote against it.”
Voting to make American service members less safe is, as Wasserman Schultz said, irresponsible and unpatriotic. Yet that’s exactly what Ben Cline did.
The amendment was defeated by a vote of 354-46.
Since his election to Congress, Cline has had a history of voting against NATO, an alliance which protects the U.S. as well as other member nations and which is needed now as much as it was during the Cold War to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and threats to other countries.
Someone should ask him why he detests the alliance so much.
Gene Zitver is the editor of ClineWatch.
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